Southern Illinois University School of Medicine will host a dramatic presentation of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for the 17th annual Emmet F. Pearson Memorial Medical History Lecture. The free, public presentation will be held at 6 p.m. Thursday, September 20, in SIU’s South Auditorium (second floor), 801 N. Rutledge St. in Springfield.

Aasne Vigesaa stars in this one-woman presentation of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published in 1892. Kevin Purcell will direct. Vigesaa and Purcell are members of Over the Moon Acting Ensemble.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is written in first-person as a series of journal entries by a woman whose husband, a physician, has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house they have rented for the summer. The work is regarded as an important early piece of American feminist literature, illustrating the attitudes toward women’s mental and physical health in the 19th Century.

The Pearson Lecture is jointly sponsored by the SIU Department of Medical Humanities and the Friends of the Pearson Museum and is supported by a grant from the Illinois Humanities Council as part of its Road Scholars program.

The lecture is named in honor of Dr. Emmet F. Pearson, a Springfield physician who also was a professor emeritus in the internal medicine and medical humanities departments at SIU. He died in June 1996. SIU’s medical museum is named in his honor.

The mission of SIU School of Medicine is to assist the citizens of central and southern Illinois in meeting their health-care needs through education, patient care, research and service to the community.